Digital PR is tough. Not only are you in competition with every other PR, fighting for the attention of journalists whose time is short and inboxes are full. But you’re also fighting against the broader news cycle. Sometimes there are things going on that you just can’t control. Resulting in your campaign or story getting buried as journalists rush to cover the big event of the day, week or month.
As our jobs get harder, it only makes sense that you should give yourself the best chance of success. The good news? There are plenty of tools that can help.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your Digital PR career or have been using the same PR tools for years, it can be overwhelming to figure out which one is worth your time. Here are some of my favourites to help you succeed in all areas of digital PR:
Perfect for media opportunities
HERO
Giving a journalist exactly what they need is one of the easiest ways to secure coverage – but connecting with them to find PR opportunities can be a challenge. HERO (Help Every Reporter Out) has replaced HARO. The tool recently moved online after it was taken over by Cision. By signing up to this digital PR tool for free, you can easily connect with those seeking expert comments or contributions.
Response Source
One potential downside of HERO is that many of the requests may only seek US-based experts – which isn’t great for your UK-based client. Response Source is a popular alternative for PR professionals based in the UK who are looking to connect with UK media representatives. Although some US-specific opportunities do come through and it can be pricey. You can set up daily alerts, and respond to messages and queries in real-time.
Streamline project management
Trello
Feeling overwhelmed with your workload? It’s easy if you’re juggling multiple clients and projects. Trello can help you organise your workload without losing track of anything, and ensure that everyone on the team knows what is going on. If you have multiple pieces of content to keep track of, for example, you can create a new board for ‘content creation’. Then you can add lists based on different parts of the production process, adding each task to it. Each task card can have notes or documents added too. This means you can keep everything in one place, know where you’re up to, and prioritise your work effectively.
Boost creativity
Answer the Public
Ideation can be tough. We don’t all feel creative all the time, and if a session for a client drops in your calendar at the last, you might panic. Answer the Public is great for ideation. This tool helps you gain deeper insights into the most popular topics being searched for online, and can be a good place to look when you’re struggling for ideas.
For design and imagery
Canva
We’re not all design pros, and we don’t all have access to design teams. Canva is perfect for helping you design graphics to highlight survey results, images for social media or creating event invitations. It’s super easy to use whether you’re a design pro or a novice, and has plenty of templates to make the whole process much easier. For creating simple designs, it’s an absolute must and a massive time saver.
Unsplash
You won’t always be able to get a great bank of images from your clients, particularly for bigger, more creative campaigns. If you’re in need of any imagery for your campaign, there are lots of free stock imagery sites out there. But my favourite is definitely Unsplash. It features a huge gallery full of beautiful photos for every topic you can think of.
For metrics and reporting
Coveragely
Some reporting tools can be expensive and difficult to use. If you don’t have much of a budget – you may find it time consuming building your own for free. Coveragely can help create visually engaging reports to showcase campaign success. Costing as little as £49 per month and with no minimum contract length, it aims to streamline coverage reporting, improve productivity and cut admin time for Digital PRs. There’s a two-week trial for those who want to road-test the tool first too. Without the need to provide billing or credit card data.
SEMrush
One of the best all-around digital marketing analytics tools, SEMrush helps you to monitor the success of your PR campaigns through its backlink tracker and media monitoring tools. You can calculate any campaign’s ROI as well as monitor overall brand awareness and how your competition is fairing. You’ll be able to see which publications are providing the most value. Plus track the number of links you have from different websites.
SEMrush’s media monitoring tools, on the other hand, help you to track mentions of both your campaign as well as your competition. It’s also a great tool for getting fast traffic scores of potential outreach targets, particularly those you are unfamiliar with.
Ahrefs
While Ahrefs has a slightly smaller offering than SEMrush, it’s still capable of offering PRs plenty of insight. One of its strong points is the detail it provides about your competitors’ campaigns, giving you in-depth information about how they grew into the space they currently occupy. If they’re gradually pulling ahead of you, you can use this knowledge to beat them at their own game. It does offer a content explorer too. This is perfect for inputting a topic to see what kind of content has been produced around the main keywords, including how many links each received. Ideal for ideation and prospecting for journalist target lists!
Outreach success
BuzzStream
Outreach is tough. Buzzstream allows you to send and track emails, find email addresses and measure the performance of a campaign. You can build lists of journalists you’ve worked with too. Helping you to keep relevant notes and details about their work. Plus, you can then track work they’ve produced or shared, attach it to relevant metrics and understand how fruitful your relationship is.
Measuring activity is key to making improvements. As mentioned already, some journalists receive hundreds of pitches a day, meaning you need to make yours stand out as much as possible. Finding out what’s working and what isn’t through email open and response rates can really help you master your pitch. Plus, Buzzstream gives you the option to edit and personalise each email you send. This is essential when pitching to journalists rather than using the bulk email approach.
Hunter
One of the hardest parts of building relationships with journalists is finding the right way to get in contact with them. Especially if you’re on a budget and don’t pay for something like Roxhill or Cision. Hunter is ideal for helping you to find the right person to contact along with their email address.
X (formerly Twitter)
A go-to for both PR professionals and journalists everywhere, X (formerly Twitter) is one of the best places to stay on top of trends, build relationships, find journalists and secure comment opportunities. Make sure you’re following journalists that work in the industry you’re representing and save any relevant hashtags. Try to use your account to build relationships with the media and engage regularly with them to help build meaningful connections.
Roxhill
Roxhill lets you easily manage and find media contacts while making distributing press releases a much smoother process. It’s specially designed to help PR teams build lasting relationships with journalists. Offering dedicated online pitching tools, webinar functionalities and social feeds to help PRs and journalists connect.
Cision
Similar to Roxhill, Cision helps digital PRs get in touch with relevant journalists and lets you schedule and send emails through the platform too. It offers analytics to see how many of your pitches have been opened or clicked on, to help you refine your pitching strategy. It also provides media monitoring so it can be a good all-round tool for anyone looking for a one-fits-all option.
Help with campaign planning
Google Tool Suite (Trends, News & Keyword Planner)
Google also offers some really great free tools such as Google Trends. This can help you identify what topics users are searching for and which are increasing or decreasing in popularity. You can drill down to quite a granular level. Perfect for looking at how trends change in different areas.
In addition to trends, Google News is an important tool to see what topics or brands have been making the news, and the type of coverage they received. It’s perfect for a really quick overview to get a topline insight of how popular any particular topic or entity is for any digital PR campaign planning.
Finally Keyword Planner finds keyword lists along with search volumes. Although you need to register to get this working, it’s well worth doing. Particularly if you don’t have a paid subscription to any other keyword tools (such as SEMrush or Ahrefs).
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a not necessarily a digital PR tool but it can help improve your campaign planning. Put simply, it generates AI responses based on human query inputs. You can ask questions and ask it to assist with the generation of various types of content like emails, comments or blog posts. As such, it can be seen as a threat. For Digital PRs – it can help with basic research, ideation and content creation. It can help break down complicated topics to make it easier to understand or help comb through lots of data. Simply paste the data and ask for some key points. Remember – it should be there to assist you, not replace you. If you’re going to use it for content creation, ensure you make changes to suit your tone of voice and always double check that facts are correct before you use the content.
